How Badly Does NBC's Bob Costas Hate the Dallas Cowboys?

Bob Costas will examine Kennedy's assassination 50 years later in a program airing Wednesday at 11 p.m. ET on NBC Sports Network. Costas will tell the story from the perspective of the 1963 Dallas Cowboys during a program titled “No Day for Games: The Cowboys and JFK", which will feature interviews with former Cowboys players and front office personnel.

“For a league that has no presence in Los Angeles, the Dallas Cowboys are as close to Hollywood as it gets,” Costas says in the opening of the show (via a press release). “But half a century ago for the Cowboys of 1963, it was fear – not football – that was on their minds.

“As symbols of the city where the President was murdered,” he continued, “the Cowboys soon found some of the nation’s anger directed towards them.”

Considering that their NFL coverage is the only thing keeping NBC's ratings from going (further) into freefall, why does Costas hate this particular team so badly that he continually uses them as a platform to politicize football?

When the scrutiny came it revealed that Jack Kennedy didn’t quite write the book, Profiles in Courage, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. The reality behind those touching photographs of his picture-perfect children cavorting round the Oval Office was their father bonking movie stars, mafia molls, and adolescent interns in the upstairs bedrooms.

The rest of the Kennedy family was scarcely better. The father, the founding father as he was called in the title of a book about him by Richard Whalen, had a dodgy financial past, was a major-league philanderer, and on balance didn’t find Adolf Hitler all that bad a sort. His brother Bobby was a bully who had worked for Senator Joseph McCarthy and, once he had power on his side, was able to make even Jimmy Hoffa seem sympathetic. The youngest brother, Teddy, later to become a great liberal hero, failed badly at Chappaquiddick, letting a young woman drown before endangering his own political career. As for the widow Kennedy, after a decent interval, she did what the cynical Gore Vidal said she was always about anyway, and went for the money in marrying the monstrous Aristotle Onassis. Such was the reality behind Camelot.

None of this is exactly a secret. Yet so little of it seems to have penetrated Americans, who, against all evidence, continue to look upon the Kennedys as our uncrowned kings. We shall all see this vividly on display the whole of this coming week. As for me, until next Monday I plan to read no newspaper, avoid the Internet, keep my television set on ESPN, and pretend I am living in Patagonia.

As the NBC's Costas demonstrates, so much for increasingly left-leaning sports television remaining free of politics this week.